People of conservative mind are so extraordinarily ready to make excuses for organised Society which they will not make for the individual. “That was a cruel age,” they will say, when you recall the judicial horrors perpetrated against human nature three hundred, two hundred, one hundred years ago; it was tradition, it was custom. But there were nations, professing Christianity--a doctrine having exactly the same basis then as now--the same creed, the same gospel, the same divine life of compassion and mercy exemplary of what Heaven required in the conduct of man to man; and there were rulers and administrators with minds and power of reason just as capable as our own--giants of intellect some of them--who, with all their profession of Christianity--interpreting it to the supposed needs of the State--have left to us this ghastly record of a penal code worse than the crimes it was set to remedy. That penal code--the obsequious servant of State-authority--stood hundreds of years behind the average individual conscience of the community. And yet in moral authority we exalt it above the individual! In age after age the conscience, the living conscience of this country went to prison and to execution to bring it just a little more up-to-date. Revolting juries refused to convict because of its savageries; and still it moved slowly and reluctantly, cruel in its fear of the human nature it did not understand. Less than a century and a half ago a girl of fourteen was sentenced in this country to be burned alive for counterfeit coining; only eighty-five years ago a boy of nine was sentenced to death for breaking a pane of glass and stealing two pence. The sentences were not carried out, but they were pronounced. I suppose it was still considered “exemplary” to remind the criminal classes of what powers the law had over them. Now let us imagine that some individual caught a boy indulging in petty theft; and to punish him--in hot blood perhaps--took him and hung him up by the neck till he was dead. Should we not be inclined to say that so rabid a wild beast must be exterminated from the face of the earth, lest he should have descendants like himself? Yet that is what our own Courts of Justice--the authorised instrument of the people of England--were doing in cold blood to young boys in the time of Charles Lamb. They had not the excuse of national danger, or war; yet we don’t think that our ancestors ought to have been abolished off the face of the earth for doing it, or for allowing it. We manage to forgive them, because after all they were--our ancestors. When it comes to a State-act, the individual shares the responsibility with so many that he is able to shift it from his conscience. But in that process what had the State done to itself? In so dealing with the criminal--it had become a criminal, making of itself a moral monstrosity--all the more foul because in the perpetration of such acts it declared that it was doing no wrong!